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Trevor Noah, Audible and Reading

I am currently listening to Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (Unabridged) written and read by Trevor Noah. His stories very much match the personality and self-awareness you see on the Daily Show (where he replaced Jon Stewart as the host). Purely from that perspective, the book is enjoyable and very funny. However, he grew up under apartheid in South Africa as half-white or “colored.” Everyone of a certain age and/or aware of world events know who Nelson Mandela was and knows the big events of ending apartheid. What his memoir generously gives us is a chance to see apartheid as it was lived day-to-day by someone who was not directly involved but now has a unique perspective on himself and those times. I highly recommend it.

Also, comparing the Israeli-Palestinian to South Africa is a false model. Israel didn’t create and is not maintaining a racist class system. They are committing genocide on roughly the same scale as Australians visited on the aborigines and the United Stated used on the Native Americans. And the Palestinians are running out of time. They are imprisoned without relief and the world needs to uphold human rights over Jewish rights and their knee-jerk reaction to Jews as victims and Muslims as terrorists.

I still read “brick and mortar” books, magazines, ebooks and emagazines. However, more and more I listen to my books. This began right around the same time that Audible did. I was a member back when you had to buy a 32MB device to listen to the productions. I initially began I needed something to occupy my time during commutes. My Audible library now has roughly 1,000 books and performances. I’ve listened to about 90%, but great swathes of them are series. I am now in the process of working my way through the library alphabetically by author. When I hit a series, I figure out if I remember it, then I check to see if there have been further releases, and then I decide whether to update it and listen. I am currently on “A” and estimate that it will take me 1-2 months to work through most letters.

The only exceptions that I make to this rule is to immediately add new books in series I am current on and new books in general. If I don’t get through those new books in a timely manner, they may drop back into the alphabet listening queue instead. I’ve found that trying to keep too many books loaded on my main device (my T-Mobile Moto X Pure Edition) causes problems for both the Audible app and phone performance, so this is my solution. I’ve also begun logging my books in Goodreads and those include books that I read as loans and from the library. I love how easy it is to get both ebooks and audiobooks as library downloads. I’ve found some great mystery series that I wouldn’t have read/heard otherwise. For very complex non-fiction books though, I get that “brick and mortar” version again because I like to highlight as I read and I have found an eReader that does this easily or lets me ruffle pages to find snippets that I remember.

If your addiction affects you as mine done, you will expand the types of books you “read” and the methods you use to access information and ideas. I encourage you to remain critical and skeptical and to look at the biases of the authors and sources. Stretch outside the world you know, but do it consciously and own it.

Goodreads – Currently Reading

Goodreads – Recently Finished

Just Thinking …

“Nobody in the world, nobody in history, has ever gotten their freedom by appealing to the moral sense of the people who were oppressing them.” ― Assata Shakur, Assata: An Autobiography

“Representation of the world, like the world itself, is the work of men; they describe it from their own point of view, which they confuse with the absolute truth.” – Simone de Beauvoir

“Naive as it may sound, inoculating society against the antisocial requires, at bottom, persuading people of what is palpably true: that society has value and everyone should contribute.” – Bruce Cannon Gibney, Author